Amazon will shut down its Chinese marketplace business this July in an effort to shift its focus to offer mainland consumers overseas products rather than goods from local sellers, Bloomberg reported.
The marketplace giant plans to continue running other businesses in China, including Amazon Web Services, Kindle ebooks and cross-border operations.
A spokesperson for Amazon told Bloomberg the commitment to China remains strong and it will continue to invest in the country. It has been shifting its focus to incoming cross-border sales catering to merchants catering to Chinese consumers looking for high-quality goods from around the world.
In July, customers logging into Amazon’s Chinese web portal, Amazon.cn, will only see a selection of goods from its global store, rather than products from third-party sellers.
According to Bloomberg, Amazon entered China in 2004 when it bought a local online bookseller for $75 million. Since then it has invested in warehouses, data centers and programs to teach Chinese sellers how to get their goods to Amazon customers.
Prime membership was launched in China in 2016 with the exception of the perk of Prime Video. Chinese marketplace giants JD.com and Alibaba has both amped up their offerings with steep discounts and Amazon still has less than 1% of the Chinese market, Bloomberg reported.
Bloomberg reported Amazon is putting more of its chips in India, where it has a chance to be a more dominant player in ecommerce. The company launched in India in 2013, its tenth global marketplace.
In 2017, Amazon expanded its fulfillment capabilities in India by adding seven new fulfillment centers and investing $5 billion in its facilities.